How I Started

Christmas 2000 – My brother in law got me one of the best Christmas gifts I ever recieved. He got me my first hockey stick and goal. It wasn’t anything special, just one of those PVC pipes and a cheap stick with a few pucks. It was great. I remember bringing it to his house, which was on a channel. At that time, it was frozen over, so we were able to go out there and play. We shoveled the ice and made tiny boards with the snow shovel. We put the net out there and just played in our shoes, since neither of us had skates and it was so small. It was a blast.

More people wanted to come and play, so we made the rink bigger. We got a second goal, and set them at opposite ends of the shoveled surface, just like a real rink. It was quite fun. We also put a thin layer of water on the rough ice every night so it’d be smooth. Wow did I fall a lot! I found a relative’s old pair of skates that I tried out when no one was around or wanted to play. It Skating wasn’t too difficult for me considering I inline skated a lot. It only took me a couple of minutes to learn to move and turn.